They are both trapped by their own contradictions: ambition and fear, desire and obligation, self-confirmation and responsibility.

Woven in a tapestry of inner voices of his heroes, Schwartz takes us from a movie-studio to a scientific laboratory; from a hospital's OR to the International symposium; from the church to the KGB office in Russia.

Among personages, whose lives are being entwined into fates of two main protagonists, there are the following:

All these personages, and many others, create a colorful pattern in the kaleidoscope of human life, where and the world of science, and the world of literature are only two colorful stones among myriads others.